Older blog entries for haruspex (starting at number 105)

raph:

I've also been playing with the Cornu spline...as a primitive for curve design, and am now absolutely convinced that it's better than Bezier curves.

I think it's long been clear that Beziers are not a good user abstraction for curve editing - but what's wrong with circle segments between on-curve knots, as chosen by IKARUS, METAFONT, et al? I am not sure anything could be more natural. I suppose the Cornu could be seen as a French-curve style extension of circles. I think I need to write that experimental path editor I always planned, to play with these alternatives :)

My hot metal friend Nick Summers is not out of the game. He wrote me recently with very exciting news:

I should finally be printing - letterpress, of course - by the end of this month ... I hope to be assembling the fabled Benton Engraving Machine some time soon as well. And restoring my Linotype. And casting on the Monotypes...

nymia: I wrote a Photoshop plugin that's downloaded 100 times a day. It's free. If I had put even a very modest sticker price on it, I'd be lucky to get one download a day. I decided that a comparatively large benefit to "the all" was preferable to a small benefit to me.

(update) nymia: The benefit I receive is the traffic. There are a couple of commercial and donation-ware plugins available from the same page, which should account for a small trickle of compensation flowing back from the free-loaders? It will never pay my mortgage, but it is -something-. After all, I only wrote the software once, if I get paid 100,000 times that might not be ethical. I don't want the bad Karma of uber-thief Gates and his kind.

TheMuso:

If you are aware of Australian internet access, it is quite different to the rest of the world, particularly broadband. I am sitting here on a 512/128K ADSL internet connection,

I am not sure what you mean, "different", unless you mean very very expensive. My Melbourne ADSL costs A$170 per month for 512kbps and an embarrassingly small download inclusion. I presume you're luckier to be paying less than this extortionate rate.

Gah. Couldn't figure out why OS X's integrated WebDAV handling wasn't working (WebDAV servers are first class file systems on OS X). Eventually figured out the problem was my squid proxy server - which at 2.2.5-4 is too old (old Debian 2.2 install on Alphaserver).

movement: hey, thanks for pointing out the idiotic Olympic linking policy. Taken with their ridiculous stance on blogging it makes them look like a bunch of dumb shits.

raph: IKARUS and Hobby's method both combine, from a user p.o.v., on-curve points with circle segments. I have long believed that this is close to the optimal curve construction technique. Hobby gets bonus points for doing it within the ubiquitous cubic Bézier framework!

I'm not sure what you mean when you say IKARUS uses Hermite splines; as far as I know it uses circle segments between on-curve knots. This is confirmed by the FORTRAN code that Dr Karow included as an appendix to his book Digital Formats for Typefaces.

You're right about CMR versus ink spread/squash. Some offset printed books set in CMR were disastrously thin in their setting. Wolfram's The Mathematica Book was one example. Beautifully printed, with almost no ink spread or dot gain, but the CMR type used throughout was most unpleasantly thin! Knuth was somewhat savvy to this issue as the models he looked up to were letterpress works such as early editions of his TAOCP (which are masterpieces of technical setting). He did include some compensatory parameters in his CMR metafonts to deal with print machinery characteristics, but perhaps some high resolution fonts were generated with unwise or default values.

Many digitisations and revivals, particulary Baskerville, Century and similar, have suffered from an underestimation and/or underappreciation of letterpress effects. I believe this issue has been studied pretty thoroughly by revival-makers (revivalists?) in the last 20 years or so.

California sees the light: Terrific paper on "Exploring Open Source alternatives" from the California Performance Review. A state that bans electronic "voting" and is also open to Open Source! What a place.

[Advogato bug: re-editing articles duplicates <p> tags between paras...]

mathieu, mpr: this may dampen your enthusiasm for Numerical Recipes.

mathieu: one friendly expert on floating point is Steve Richfield. I'm sure he - or another FP guru - can give you some good references if you ask on comp.arch.arithmetic.

criswell: LOL!

When bush comes to shove

bolsh: Oh, he'll "win" it. Even if the puppetmasters have to rig another election. Smell a civil war brewing? That's what it will take to oust them. The issues are as serious as slavery... except... this time, we're ALL potential slaves.

If you think of the election as Oscar night, rest assured the name of the new incumbent is already written and sealed in the envelope.

(Pretty soon, we'll be able to skip the "campaign" and "party" and "voting" charades entirely. Just fast forward to the appointment.)